[Darris McNeely] Gary, yesterday you were talking about knowledge, understanding, and wisdom as practical steps to getting into the book of Proverbs and how to understand the book. But let's bring it down to somebody's level—I've got a neighbor who's lost his job, he's having to work long hours, he's a victim of the new economy. And obviously at some point he's going to have to make transition to the new career just to keep his family fed and in the house that they're in. How would someone in that situation apply these principles that you were talking about to come to the right decision in their life? How do they get to wisdom?

[Gary Petty] Well, your friend is facing the same problem that all of us face when we have to make a big decision. And that is, that the emotions involved. We're facing all these emotions—fear, anxiety, worry, you know, excitement—we have all these different emotions. What we have to do is realize to make wise decisions, we have to sort through the emotions—set them aside—and actually go through a process that leads us to the right decision. That's what this, looking at the book of Proverbs, looking at these three stages is so important. We start with knowledge. Now, in the case of your friend, what he needs to do is begin to gather facts about the job he has, other jobs, what he would like to do—maybe take some testing on his skillset. What he needs to do is start to gather all this information of what he wants to do, what jobs are available, where he might have to move. He's gathering all of this information. Then, once he gathers the information…

[Darris McNeely] And in the process of doing that, he's probably going to divorce himself from a lot of the emotion that he's got.

[Gary Petty] Exactly right. But also, as he does this, he starts to realize, “Wait a minute. I can't just go jump and get a job. I can't leave this job to go jump and get a job. I have to hold this one until I can find another job.” Because he doesn't want to be without money. See that's where the emotion drives you to do something that just doesn't work. So okay, gathering these facts is knowledge. It takes times. You have to work through this process. Now, once you do that, you have to understand it. Understanding comes from taking and processing that information. What you do when you're going through this understanding stage is you take all this information and you put—get pieces of paper, put a line down the middle and this is decision number one, whatever it is. And then you put all the negatives and the positives of that decision—everything you can think of with all the knowledge you've gathered.  If you don't have enough knowledge, you go back to that stage, then you come back to understanding. Now, you have one, two, three, four decisions. As you're looking through these decisions, one or two of them you might be able to throw out right away because there's so many negatives. Now, you narrow this down to your possible decisions and this is where you go to wisdom.

[Darris McNeely] And how does a person get to wisdom?

[Gary Petty] Okay, when you start with wisdom, you go to Proverbs 9:10. Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. You go to God. God designed life. He knows how this works. You go to Him and you let Him teach you. Now, He's not going to make the decision for you, but what's He's going to do is help you go through this process. And the second thing you do is you just have to go through the process. And sometimes you're going to make bad decisions. That's part of life. We all make bad decisions. We can't look on that as failure. What we have to do is look at those bad decisions as learning processes. And so you go back through, and we go through knowledge, understanding, making proper decisions, making them work. But we always start with God.

[Darris McNeely] And the key is coming to godly wisdom as opposed to our wisdom.

[Gary Petty] That's right.

[Darris McNeely] That's BT Daily. Join us next time.